Mayer Spivack (1936 - 2011) is @MayerSpivack on Twitter. He was a consultant and advisor on organizational behavior, innovation, and learning, based near Boston, Massachusetts. He was also an artist working in a variety of media. All writing and artworks presented here are the original work and are the copyrighted property of Mayer Spivack. Nothing on this weblog is aggregated from other sources. Reasonable use involving copying with attribution, and limited sharing not for profit, are allowed. Your comments are invited. This blog is now maintained by his son, Nova Spivack. We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your interest.

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15 posts categorized "culture"

February 22, 2010

We now accept that voice activated computers have come of age. There are many applications of voice input that are used by people wishing to avoid using their keyboards. We read about direct brain control of the computer interface and have seen convincing demos of this in action as a prosthetic assist and as research effort. Soon that too will seem commonplace.

The profusion of technologies that offer novel ways for people to enter information into their computers will continue to amaze us. But will the keyboard ever disappear? I strongly doubt it.

Why would we not want to abandon a mechanical kluge, that is noisy, prone to repetitive stress injuries, ergonomically ridiculous in it’s qwerty modality, and slow? Even so, we writers will hang onto our keyboards with our aching fingers even as technical wizards and early adopters call us luddites.

We like our keyboards for the same reasons that we like musical instruments. They serve nearly identical purposes. Human language has deep roots. Early primate language was very likely a mixture of gesture and musical vocalizations. Imagine a lot of hand and finger waving with sounds that are part singing and part muttered intonations. Other species and evolutionary branches are much the same using body position, vibration, arching, puffing, color, and ritualized ‘dance’.

Penmanship and cursive writing served us well and fulfilled some of the same purposes for hundreds of years, just look at the fancy almost carved letter work in a handwritten document from the past several centuries. The visual text supported and illustrated the meaning of the text.

Almost every developed society has it’s own unique version of sign language for the deaf. These expressive languages are rich in meaning, art, and subtlety—and they are gesture languages. They are languages of the body, the arms, the hands and fingers, the face, eyes and mouth.

What does this collection of apparently unrelated examples tell us about keyboards? That they are a continuation of hand gestures and signing, they are in a way related to music and music making. When we type many of us ‘run’ a parallel soundtrack of the written language in our mind’s-ear as it appears on the screen. Nobody else can hear it, but it must sound right to us. This is an integral part of the creative process for writers like myself.

Is there much difference between my Mac Book Pro laptop keyboard and a pianist’s keyboard? My keyboard holds many aesthetic pleasures for me. It has a satisfying ‘feel’ that is rich in kinesthetic feedback to my fingers and hands. It is klicky and tub-thumpy. It makes satisfying sounds for my ears to use in judging if keys have been properly struck. It is warm to the touch and the keys are softly sculpted to cradle my fingertips. I usually don’t like other keyboards. Most importantly, when I use my keyboard in a writing project, I feel free. The freedom of expression that the keyboard offers to a trained touch-typist is a great pleasure. It is a freedom machine for the mind. There it is— what a good keyboard offers is pleasure in creating a musical and meaningful text. You can’t take that away from me.

April 18, 2009

Was It Torture that the Bush administration lawyers
allowed, within ‘limits’? My first question is how could they have known if it
was or was not torture? Had they tried the various techniques on themselves or
on each other in a specially equipped legal dungeon with a dispassionate group,
twelve of their peers, observing, taking snapshots, and helping to form a
decision? It is common to expect experts in any professional discipline to have
some direct experience living, or at least working within the niche where they
advise or decide.

Now that so many people worldwide are out of jobs, as a
nation we may be grateful for the visibility of strong, hands-on famous
role-models teaching us how to get and keep a job.

I suggest that any tribunal that seeks to pass judgment on
the people who allowed torture, and those who did the torturous acts, make it
their goal to give these folks their old jobs back—with slightly altered job
descriptions. Put them back to work as evaluators who are in a proper position
to decide just where the line is that demarcates torture from uncomfortable piffle.
Their daily work, on a contract of uncertain duration—(to assure their ‘security’)
would oblige them to subject themselves, and each other, to the same
experiences they once had decreed for others. At the end of that work they will
be able to render opinions and judgments of their own, on precisely where that
line aught to be drawn.

These serious legal issues are at the core of national and
worldwide debates that only seasoned field experts can hope to sort out for us.
We trusted them and depended upon them when they made their initial
determinations, and we should continue show our trust and loyalty and support now.
In a sentence, our hats are off to the lot of you as your head(s) are off to the dungeons,
and keep up the great work!

April 15, 2009

Artists have practice in survival on minimal rations and
little income. Many make little or no income from art, but with pluck and luck
can make a side-job support their own work efforts. Peanut-butter and impasto paint
are both common artist’s materials. Peanuts in—paints out.

Some people must be paid to do a stitch of work, while
artists gladly pay for the privilege of working. That is the first paradox. The
second paradox is that what the larger economy values (not necessarily art),
has now become massively devalued and everyone else’s shirts are in tatters,
the hair shirts worn by artists are still as itchy, and covered with wet clay
and paint.

While Christies and other Auction houses, and the
galleries report declining art sales, this does not much affect most living
artists whose art is rarely shown, and infrequently offered at high-end
auctions.

Now, as the economic slump closes factories and stores, causing
bankruptcies and foreclosures, artists work right on into the night, their
studio lights burning brightly.

Many people who disliked their jobs have now lost them
along with their income and security. Artists still have their artwork and love
to do it. They are used to not having security and they don’t have it now. Yet,
we are not all in the same boat. Artists keep on working, creating the inherent
value of discovery and invention. They open our senses to what was previously
unnoticed, sometimes make ‘beautiful’ objects or images, and in the process
they re-create our ideas of the beautiful; and they remain busy.

They are working to create something of real value to themselves. How could art be “real value”? If I
replace the word ‘real’ with ‘long-enduring’ does that help? New breakthrough artworks become the great art
treasures of tomorrow and their value may last for generations, if not for
centuries. Notice the word ‘may last’—this is not risk-free investment. No
investment is risk-free, as today’s headlines demonstrate. It is up to the
collector/art buyer to perform their own due-diligence; to know the current art
world, and to go it one better based on their personal aesthetic choices, to
invest in the un-noticed or undervalued artists, find the significant, the
rare, and to buy and to exhibit these works, and thereby create a niche for
their growing collection.

Most of the time, the works of living artists are affordable,
because artists must meet a ‘price-point’ that smaller art collectors can bear.
Now during the economic slump these artworks are relative bargains, available
to the more prosperous collectors who have not lost their taste for art that
they still love, even though they no longer can afford the work of great
masters.

This is their time to pounce. Great art collections were acquired
this way, when relatively wealthy collectors, art patrons, galleries, and
private buyers have invested in art while others counted only their losses.
Their investments in art were often relatively so small in comparison with
their own larger economic losses (along with the losses of others), that the downside
risk was negligible while the upside possibilities were great.

Many of those investments appreciated wildly over decades
and are the reasons that we visit now museums. Museums, these days more so than
banks, continue to retain works of real value.

Now is the time for smart people to visit their local
artists, before the quick old foxes wake the lazy dogs.

April 08, 2009

Economic recession and depression are part of the larger
psychological ecosystem that interacts with individual human depression. If we
were too busy to notice these relationships before the current economic ‘downturn’,
we cannot fail to be aware of it now if we read the headlines.

We all live together in a largely unnoticed greater
context of nested interacting ecosystems. This is a way of describing and
interlinking environments of all sorts—physical, social, economic, educational,
climatic, geophysical—I could go on naming them until the list and their interactions
became too complex to imagine, let alone sort out. That is the work of science,
and this is a brief article of opinion.

People are killing themselves and each other at an
increasing rate. While what the media casually refers to as ‘gun violence’ has
always varied quite a lot, in the United States statistics have been more or
less consistently bloody with up’s and down’s but the yearly totals of deaths
by violence of all kinds is usually written in red ink. Murder is probably
easier with a gun, but without guns, psychotics would kill with knives or bats or automobiles.
We cannot hope to limit the uses of sticks and stones, bats and bullets, but we
can and must deliver mental health intervention to desperately needy families
and individuals even in tough times. Most especially in tough times. Everyone
knows of at least one such example. Every community institution is aware of
several or many. We pile up the papers, overwork and underpay our health
delivery workers and ignore the problems until the spike on the desk is
suddenly bloodied.

Since the downturn, there has been an up-tick, a
compulsive thumb cocking the hammer and releasing the safety; taking aim at the
mirror or through the window. Desperate times trigger desperate acts and the
times are becoming increasingly desperate.

The feeling of helplessness, or real hopelessness and helplessness
for that matter, is at least in part a mental and emotional trap, a closed dark
room. For some this room has only rage and a gun as an exit.

Will we change our attitudes about emotional stress,
depression, and the potential for destructive acts like murder and suicide, or
quite often murder/suicide and rid ourselves of the stigma of being human and
terribly upset?

Probably we will not be effective in large-scale public
education and healthcare delivery for some time to come, as financial resources
for preventative care are being cut from budgets. Can you see the downward
spiral?

We may complain and grow fearful for our lives and for our
children’s safety, but it is our collective responsibility, not our guilt, that
needs to be recognized. In these desperate times, we desperately need
legislation to assist in the early identification of children and adults who
are at high risk of committing mayhem, and get some kind of help delivered to
their doors, whatever the cost.

There are far too many privately owned guns in the nation
to effectively reduce their use in psychotic attacks. There are, as most of us
have been figuring out, far more crazy people, seriously crazy people, in every
group than we used to believe. Believe it now.

As a nation, we have jealously guarded both our first amendment
right to peaceably assemble, and our second amendment right to keep and bear
arms. These two positive aspects of our national heritage are coming into
increasing conflict. How long will you or anyone feel safe in a crowd that
(statistically) must contain a few depressed people with fear, helplessness, self-hate,
rage, and homicide blocking their minds?

Gun control, or perhaps more realistically an acceptably
intelligent negotiated legislative effort leading to ‘gun management’ will be
of some limited help.

We must focus our attention on matters of mental health,
childhood education and safety from abuse, and job creation.

March 21, 2009

When you work with other people’s money you may be tempted
to play with money. Some bankers now seem to fear that no one will trust them
or pay them again—ever, so they are trying to quickly grab asmuch cash as they can on the way out of
the tower, a case of institutional ‘take the money and run’.

In a few months time, everything they value or measure value
by, has been devalued by their own hand. They have undone themselves and us. As their stash of value diminishes (as does our own), by
reflection, their self-worth along with their net worth—disintegrates. Their
established social and professional connections fracture. They are in pain. In a
moneyslide, many now tumble like mud down an over-logged hillside in a downpour,
pouring down from the top and wildly grabbing at our wallets to stop their
fall. They appear ready to take anything from anyone because they believe that
their own lives or their way-of-life is out of control and the whole hill is washing
down the sewers. The out-of-control aspect of their fall is crucial to their
mental health. These folks were quite control centered orderly people when
things are going their way. That is why we trusted them. As the chaos they created
explodes around them, they have become disoriented and helpless. They have no
control of anything. They are at a Wall Street intersection, with their pants
down. It is no dream, and their panic is beyond their (or our own) control.

Something happens in the conscience (wherever that may be
in the brain) when a marginally illegal, destructive, or self-destructive
impulse goes badly wrong. When bankers and investment councilors lie and run
off with lots of our money they also lose everything that they are or have been.
They lose their sense of who they are and eventually lose their money. Once
heroes of the reserved tables and the country club, they fear that they will be
shunned.

Just as the depressed enraged husband who mangles and
shoots his wife and children must then tip into
the part of his mind from which there is no returning, and must shoot himself
to stop his crazy rage, these moneymadmen tip
and morph into self-destructive cash filled piñatas that will be batted about by
their victims until they are entirely emptied of their hoard of sweets and
pocket change.

People seem to have a tipping-point
for fear. When unconscious fear and guilt dominates the mind; when a sneak
becomes a thief, that thief may become a bank-robber. This is whybankers rob banks (After all, who else has the
insider information to be able to rob a bank?). As we know there have been many ‘professional’
bankrobbers
who famously robbed banks in the kind of robberies that require a misspelled note
handed to the teller, a mysterious paper bag, and maybe a gun. (Incidentally
this classic kind of penny-anti bank robbery is on the increase now that the
magic carpet has flown off without us, pilot-less.) Bonnie and Clyde are the
archetypal characters in that dramatic tradition. But these kinds of crooks are
amateurs despite the infrequent dramatic heist in which they haul off thousands
of dollars in nickel and dime money-bags. They rarely vanish with billions. The
pros are showing the way and providing their biographies for the next decade’s
film scripts.

We are gullible. In lies we trust. Our trusting mind-sets and
belief systems having learned unshakable categories for social and professional
roles and behavior, and codes of conduct and ethics, we do not anticipate that the
trusted experts upon whom we depend are playing with our money in an expensive
version of three-card-Monte or a shell-game with our minds and our money. Gullibility,
our own greed, and our ignorance allow us no hint that bankers might ever become
robbers.

There is a wailing multi-million-voiced high wind on Wall
Street. The card game is been busted, and the cards are scattering with the operator,
the shills, and the marks money.
We have seen the cardboard box fold-up and blow away, and the confident
ingratiating smile twist into a smirk.

Trust not only has to be earned, it has to be
demonstrated, and we must do our own and our national due-diligence by asking the
kind of simple, probing, questions that must untangle and ultimately result in
laws that edit out misleading language and the tiny print on the other side of
our contracts. So far we have been reluctant to reveal the extent of our
ignorance to our hired-in experts. But this is not ignorance. it is honest confusion
in a long prevailing culture of financial obfuscation and fraud.

Once we were e a nation of people who made things. We
worked with our hands, our minds, and our whole bodies to produce goods of
value to ourselves and to others. That kind of effort was a full time job (and
where has that gone?) that left little time or energy for a farmer or machinist
to become an amateur banker or investment broker. This information-gap provided
the niche for the con men. That gap and the niche will never go away. Someone
will always try to exploit it. But we need to get back to the business of
making stuff of real utility and tangible goods of value. We can now take off
our dunce-caps. We can stop pushing paper around from pile to pile until
someone looses track of it. April fools used to last only one day. Let’s keep
it that way.

August 08, 2008

The Singularity—The Siren.
If any definition of ‘The Singularity’ is: That future moment when artificial intelligence function levels in machines are equal to or greater than human intelligence, then how do we get there from here? By the wayside, how intelligent are we? What do we include and exclude from our definitions of intelligence, including our own?

The Railroad Track Illusion.
Consider a walk alongside a railway line where one rail represents human intelligence and the other represents AI. The tracks will always remain parallel because the two kinds of intelligence are likely to remain dissimilar. From where and when we stand here and now, standing on one rail, they do appear to join at the horizon— at ‘The Singularity’. However, no matter how far we walk, these rails will remain parallel and never join.

Yet, something is shifting in the ground below the tracks. Humans are becoming cleverer, (but not necessarily smarter), and computer driven AI is getting more complex. We wonder, are these rails beginning to bend toward a convergence? Is their angle changing as their intelligences grow? Is this path converging, or is it only asymptotically, ever so tauntingly, closing the impossible gap? Perhaps despite increases in computation power and richness, and greater human ingenuity, the tracks can only become narrower gauge, to remain forever parallel however nearly touching.

May 20, 2008

The NYT has proven itself again and again during this Democratic race to be as conservative as anyone in the industry. The media ’s “molly coddling” of Senator Obama has been as rampant as the sexism towards Senator Clinton. To imply that Senator Obama is somehow a weak and helpless victim of a strong woman candidate, is ridiculous and astounding in this century. It is interesting that the fact that he was raised by a white mother and grandparent, while being abandoned by his African father has been played down in the media. Multicultural would be a more accurate description of Obama's background, not simply focusing on the ethnicity of his father. Isn’t that a rascist, as well as sexist position for the media to take about Senator Obama’s personal history? “Lack of luck and skill” is not the issue for Senator Clinton… The media has set the stage for this, and I am sad to say that the NYT has played a major role in perpetuating the sexism and 1950’s mentality towards a strong and extremely competent candidate for President of the United States.

This was first posted by L.H. Freedman on May 19th, 2008 @1:31 PM in the New York Times.

February 25, 2008

Many Americans, and especially the press and media, fear, talk about, and impugn strong confident women who enter the generally hardball realm (or kick-boxing ring) of political power. While we are all free to talk in any way we wish to, expressing ourselves in either healthy or unhealthy ways, the media and the press have a greater impact on government then the rest of us when they pronounce or broadcast prejudicial speech, sly winking innuendo and personal neurosis in place of balanced measured opinion and factual journalism.

The media therefore have an obligation to us all to hold their opinion and journalism to the highest possible standards. They cannot behave like a snickering high-school locker-room gang if they are to maintain credibility as the Fourth Estate. Some members of the press and media (and ourselves) would benefit us all if they had their heads examined.

I am not attempting to present a psychobiography of either Democratic candidate but instead to inspire all of us, especially individuals in the media, to examine and outgrow a few of our attitudes, fears and prejudices. Each of us manifests our own personal psychodynamics, and those effect how we might correctly judge or misjudge the characters of the candidates. In the interests of writing accurate reportage or making sound decisions each person in the media and press should strive to identify and separate our neurotic reactions, resentments and old childhood fears, particularly regarding powerful women, from the real issues of candidacy and presidential office.

As a lifelong Democrat and a retired psychotherapist I watch and listen to the debates between two fine Democratic candidates for nomination to the presidency with the fabled psychotherapist’s ‘third ear’.

My ‘third’ ear hears a great deal of intolerable, underhanded anti-female rhetoric, particularly from within the media. I also hear that both candidates are locked into a sorry three-way zero-sum battle with the press and with each other while the rest of us watch or cheer the fight. I hope that we can learn what our unconscious positions are, become more aware of them, question them, and that all might benefit from some self-searching for the benefit of the democratic and Democratic Party process.

February 06, 2008

National Public Radio, that great national radio university, announced that voters in some states were unable to vote because some polling places ran short of ballots and envelopes. Voters waited outside polling places in freezing weather for their moment in the voting booth. Many waited patently while many were too cold and could wait no more. But worse still, many were stopped at the door after waiting for hours because ballots and ballot envelopes had run out. Why do we allow this?

Every mailbox in this nation is stuffed with junk mail every day. Nearly all of that goes directly into the trash. We accept or tolerate that situation.

We also tolerate denying voting rights to eager voters because we are afraid to waste a little more paper. We have to expect the waste of some paper ballots in order to preserve our votes. The assurance that every voter can vote is worth the cost of additional trash, and is a worthwhile and manageable risk. Our failure to print one ballot and provide one envelope for every registered voter in the nation is a silly false economy.

We should require federal law to mandate every state, district and county to protect the right of every voter by providing enough voting ‘stationary’ for everyone. We should assume and expect that some ballots and envelopes will remain to be recycled. No person or agency should be permitted to estimate or guess future voter turn-out based upon previous election figures.

Compared to the annual gross national paper junk-mail waste-stream, two additional sheets of paper per possible voter per election-year (recycled at that) is more than a fair trade and expense for the guarantee of our individual voting rights. This change would also put an end to one form of voter manipulation that is no less than a sub-rosa form of gerrymandering. This should become our next, or first, electoral reform. If this voter fairness requires government subsidy, so be it, no matter how poor, we all can afford to add it to our income tax. A penny for your thoughts.

January 05, 2008

This posting is another in what I now realize will be a longer series on the life-cycle and utility of communication channels. The first, posted on December 14, 2003 is entitled: Six Stages In The Life Cycle Of Communication Channels.Six Stages In The Life Cycle Of Communcation Channels Now in this current paper I will consider the special case of information propagation and dissemination for original, disruptive, or counterintuitive intellectual content.

The peer-review process filters undesirable qualities from publications within scientific and academic communities. It is generally intolerant of innovations, disruptive observations, and contributors whose work is nearly entirely original (with the exception of mathematics), yet these qualities are essential to a healthy intellectual environment.

Original workers take great risks, often remain isolated from their peers, and are typically shunned and disrespected by potential employers. They are lonely thinkers that crave colleagues and dialogue.

The web-log, or blog, is now the most accessible as well as the most rapid route to publication for these original minds, and it does offer some dialogue. But the blogosphere is a generally a chaotic and unreliable marketplace for information. It is more often used for agglomerating news, publishing news and commentary or accessing news, either personal or news of interest to the greater community, than as a portal for serious intellectual publication.

Publishing original material on a blog is risky because the contribution is automatically branded unreliable because the writers become known by the company that they keep, and that company is far too often intellectually messy and unreliable.

November 19, 2007

Imagine that the worldwide network is in fact only a information sausage exchange and sausage packing plant . If we poke a peephole in the roof and look down at the operations below, we see crowds of people, millions really, trying to stuff their own information into some sausage and send it off, or pick-up a delivery of sausage with their name on it. Each person arrives with some idea or question to stuff into the sausage-making machines below. We see that the production line winds around like an airport check-in area—unrelated people are located in front of and behind each other, each in their turn stuffing their information into funnels, filling each of the sausage-skins in sequence with discontinuous, unrelated packages of information.

The information-sausages move along the line, each filled with it’s bits, and are cut off from the endless supply at the end of the line where a packing station counts lengths of just-so-many-sausages to be randomly tossed into boxes and shipped out the back door. From our perch on the roof we see outside the building that the boxes are carried away and distributed through the distribution network.

At millions of endpoints and nodes in this network, like the one you are on right now, humans get to sample the sausage and digest it’s contents. But the overall impression we get from looking down through our peephole is that of too many people trying to jam too much stuff into too many small packages and tossing them unsorted, into an endless queue of trucks. We are looking at a traffic jam stretching from input to destination of ideas, words, bits, identities, locations, and workers, each speaking different languages, without understanding of meaning. It is Babel, even for those who speak the same language. The hum is deafening, the noise out-shouts the signal. This signal to noise imbalance is most difficult when nasty selfish folks attempt to fill millions of sausage links with viruses causing endless trouble. While the sum of all this effort is greater than the sausages themselves, it is not as great as it should be. We have a thoughtless network because information does not conform to semantic structures. We need a thoughtful one structured in the terms of human language. We need Twine (developed by Radar Networks Inc.) to tie our packages together in personalized 'giftwrap'.

November 05, 2007

Fear, isolation, and a sense of numbing helplessness characterize the nursing home, the mental hospital and other institutional experiences for the majority of inmates. To enter a hospital, especially a mental hospital or a nursing home, either as a visitor or a patient, is to encounter an environment that has no equal in barrenness anywhere in our culture except for the prisoner's cell.

These environments may be described as dis-integrated or degraded because they lack wholeness; they are incomplete. Because the ordinary everyday settings for behavior are missing, they cannot adequately support the great range of human activities and behaviors that are associated with everyday life and particularly with the recovery process. Most institutions force inmates to ‘kill time’ without purpose. More typically and destructively, institutional environments may further impair the patients' faith in their own competence to take care of themselves and live normal independent lives. Prolonged institutionalization or hospitalization, especially in a mental hospital, nursing home, or prison may seriously impair the inmate’s mental health, as individual’s responsibilities and social behaviors fall away.

Psychiatry and psychology in particular, and medicine in general, all lack a clear vision or theory of mental health and ‘wellness’, as distinct from illness, that could inform and enrich the lives of patients in their care. Since the earliest records of institutional mental health treatment there have been relatively few reform revolutions during which the quality of the patients' experience, their environment, and their care were given enriching humane attention.

November 04, 2007

A Discussion of the Social Consequences and Individual Psychodynamics Within The Violence Cycle

The social and personal processes of abuse, anger and denial fuel a psychological chain reaction— the violence cycle. Our psychological defense process of anger-denial promotes and maintains this violence cycle by further denying that violent events are cyclic phenomena, and denying that they are endemic to our culture. We hide their presence in nearly every family, so that the painful or violent events experienced by nearly everyone from earliest childhood onward must be systematically suppressed. This denial uses the building blocks of suppressed childhood anger to produce adult rage that is too often expressed as violence.

This personal and social process of denial serves both the individual's neurotic psychological needs and the needs of society by identifying and punishing only the most recent perpetrator of violence, exonerating ourselves and our parents. Most protected are the particular parents (and/or others) who aimed the original and causative and determining violent painful experiences at the helpless, powerless and once innocent, child who has now become the latest violent actor in this millennial drama.

Quietness in extremes in an indicator of suppressed expression and of depression. We should become especially aware of children who have a severely narrowed emotional repertoire. These children need help now. By helping them we may prevent a violent future.

Their crimes all seem senseless because we cannot sense their causes using only our unexamined but still popular premises. The sense of these crimes eludes us. We search clues for a motive— which we mistakenly equate with— a reason. But motives are not reasons. We confuse the idea of reasons (with it’s whiff of reasonableness) with the idea of causality. The kinds of motives that satisfy the police and the courts may be probable causes but they are not reasonable causes, they are usually only thetriggering circumstances (literally and figuratively) of a particular act of violence. They are the immediate causes, the formative determinant causes causes are far older, and predate perhaps by decades the recent circumstance of motive. Facts as they are quoted and discovered by the press and the police cannot and do not explain the action to our satisfaction. We hear neighbors left pondering an image of ‘human nature’ presented as a mysterious and unfathomable dark (animalistic, wicked, sinful) horror. Yet there remains some sense to be discovered. Were we to use the right questions with more reflective, and self-reflective intentions we might pull straight the psychodynamic thread that runs through all this violence and killing.

We all know that guns have two ends, the pointy end, the one with the hole in it and the blunt end where the shooter is. There is really a third end on every gun, and that is what I want to point out. But to do that I will have to discuss a bit of psychology.

The person on the pointy end is scared, and in mortal danger. The person on the blunt end, the one who is aiming the gun, the would-be-shooter, may be nervous, may be terrified if he or she feels that his or her life is in danger were it not for the power of the gun, or may be enraged and mentally ill. But when a gun is aimed by someone who is enraged, or slightly angry, or mentally ill, the third end of the gun comes into gun-play; that is the psychological end, where the shooter feels insulated from harm by being at the powerful end of the gun. This kind of shooter is not sane, nor mentally healthy—and these terms do not mean the same thing. This shooter is mentally ill, and insane—both. The third end of the gun is the emotional act of shooting the gun. It is an end in itself. In school shootings and many other kinds of shootings, all three ends of the gun are involved.

Blogroll of honor + Websites

The Alex Foundation- Home pageIrene Pepperberg studies cognitive process, teaching and learning in birds. She is problably the most recognized researcher on avian cognition in the world. Alex, her now famous long-time research subject and 'collaborator' recently died at half his life expectancy. Now Wart and Griffin are her collaborators. They are saying and doing things we used to believe that only small children, great apes, and dolphins could do. Her brilliant work deserves better funding.

Minding the PlanetNova is a cognitive scientist and high-tech entrepreneur working on technologies that overcome our information overload. He has founded companies and is now developing interactive internet software, TWINE, that we all need. His thinking covers a great range. He is my Son.